Blog

Shooting for the stars – ASM’s journey towards complete metadata

At Crossref, we care a lot about the completeness and quality of metadata. Gathering robust metadata from across the global network of scholarly communication is essential for effective co-creation of the research nexus and making the inner workings of academia traceable and transparent. We invest time in community initiatives such as Metadata 20/20 and Better Together webinars. We encourage members to take time to look up their participation reports, and our team can support you if you’re looking to understand and improve any aspects of metadata coverage of your content.

In the know on workflows: The metadata user working group

Jennifer Kemp

Jennifer Kemp – 2023 February 28

In UsersMetadataCommunity

What’s in the metadata matters because it is So.Heavily.Used. You might be tired of hearing me say it but that doesn’t make it any less true. Our open APIs now see over 1 billion queries per month. The metadata is ingested, displayed and redistributed by a vast, global array of systems and services that in whole or in part are often designed to point users to relevant content. It’s also heavily used by researchers, who author the content that is described in the metadata they analyze.

Don’t take it from us: Funder metadata matters

Why the focus on funding information? We are often asked who uses Crossref metadata and for what. One common use case is researchers in bibliometrics and scientometrics (among other fields) doing meta analyses on the entire corpus of records. As we pass the 10 year mark for the Funder Registry and 5 years of funders joining Crossref as members to register their grants, it’s worth a look at some recent research that focuses specifically on funding information.

Measuring Metadata Impacts: Books Discoverability in Google Scholar

This blog post is from Lettie Conrad and Michelle Urberg, cross-posted from the The Scholarly Kitchen. As sponsors of this project, we at Crossref are excited to see this work shared out. The scholarly publishing community talks a LOT about metadata and the need for high-quality, interoperable, and machine-readable descriptors of the content we disseminate. However, as we’ve reflected on previously in the Kitchen, despite well-established information standards (e.g., persistent identifiers), our industry lacks a shared framework to measure the value and impact of the metadata we produce.

How funding agencies can meet OSTP (and Open Science) guidance using existing open infrastructure

In August 2022, the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo (PDF) on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research (a.k.a. the “Nelson memo”). Crossref is particularly interested in and relevant for the areas of this guidance that cover metadata and persistent identifiers—and the infrastructure and services that make them useful. Funding bodies worldwide are increasingly involved in research infrastructure for dissemination and discovery.

Better preprint metadata through community participation

Preprints have become an important tool for rapidly communicating and iterating on research outputs. There is now a range of preprint servers, some subject-specific, some based on a particular geographical area, and others linked to publishers or individual journals in addition to generalist platforms. In 2016 the Crossref schema started to support preprints and since then the number of metadata records has grown to around 16,000 new preprint DOIs per month.

Flies in your metadata (ointment)

Quality metadata is foundational to the research nexus and all Crossref services. When inaccuracies creep in, these create problems that get compounded down the line. No wonder that reports of metadata errors from authors, members, and other metadata users are some of the most common messages we receive into the technical support team (we encourage you to continue to report these metadata errors). We make members’ metadata openly available via our APIs, which means people and machines can incorporate it into their research tools and services - thus, we all want it to be accurate.

2022 public data file of more than 134 million metadata records now available

In 2020 we released our first public data file, something we’ve turned into an annual affair supporting our commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). We’ve just posted the 2022 file, which can now be downloaded via torrent like in years past. We aim to publish these in the first quarter of each year, though as you may notice, we’re a little behind our intended schedule. The reason for this delay was that we wanted to make critical new metadata fields available, including resource URLs and titles with markup.

Amendments to membership terms to open reference distribution and include UK jurisdiction

Tl;dr Forthcoming amendments to Crossref’s membership terms will include: Removal of ‘reference distribution preference’ policy: all references in Crossref will be treated as open metadata from 3rd June 2022. An addition to sanctions jurisdictions: the United Kingdom will be added to sanctions jurisdictions that Crossref needs to comply with. Sponsors and members have been emailed today with the 60-day notice needed for changes in terms. Reference distribution preferences In 2017, when we consolidated our metadata services under Metadata Plus, we made it possible for members to set a preference for the distribution of references to Open, Limited, or Closed.

With a little help from your Crossref friends: Better metadata

We talk so much about more and better metadata that a reasonable question might be: what is Crossref doing to help? Members and their service partners do the heavy lifting to provide Crossref with metadata and we don’t change what is supplied to us. One reason we don’t is because members can and often do change their records (important note: updated records do not incur fees!). However, we do a fair amount of behind the scenes work to check and report on the metadata as well as to add context and relationships.